Nvidia is launching the first series of RTX 50 GPUs based on its new Blackwell architecture, starting with the RTX 5090 and working down from there. The company also appears to be dropping support for some of its older GPU architectures, according to these CUDA Release Notes seen by Tom Hardware.
The release notes say that CUDA support for the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPU architectures “is considered complete and will be frozen in an upcoming release.” While all of these architectures, which together cover GeForce GPUs from the older GTX 700 series to the 2016 GTX 1000 series, plus a pair of Quadro and Titan workstation cards, are still supported by the Game driver package Ready from Nvidia’s December, the end of support for the new CUDA feature suggests that these GPUs will eventually be removed from these driver packages soon.
It’s common for Nvidia and AMD to drop support for another batch of architectures all at once every few years; Nvidia last stopped supporting older cards in 2021and AMD stopped supporting several prominent GPUs in 2023. Both companies maintain a separate driver branch for some of their older cards, but releases typically only happen every few months and focus on security updates, not delivering new features or performance optimizations for new games.